Tag Archives: water resources

goodbye my darling

The Darling, a major river in New South Wales, Australia (where Sydney, Canberra, and Melbourne are) has all but dried up. It’s not addressed in this article, but I recall that Australia’s political system has managed to anticipate and adapt to climate change reasonably well when it comes to drinking water for its major coastal cities. But one thing this article notes is that the country has gone from a net exporter to a net importer of wheat. It is also indigenous populations in the more rural areas who tend to bear the brunt.

rain measurement using cameras

This article is about estimating rainfall using ordinary surveillance camera footage and computer algorithms to process the videos. Measuring rainfall with physical rain gauges is subject to a lot of error, and so far the only real way to reduce the uncertainty is to add more gauges, which of course costs money. Radar can be used to improve our knowledge of what is going on in the spaces between rain gauges, but ultimately the radar-based estimates still end up being calibrated to the gauges. New methods to improve accuracy for a given gauge coverage, and/or reduce cost and gauge coverage while maintaining accuracy, would be welcome.

Advancing opportunistic sensing in hydrology: a novel approach to measuring rainfall with ordinary surveillance cameras

“Opportunistic sensing” represents an appealing idea for collecting unconventional data with broad spatial coverage and high resolution, but few studies have explored its feasibility in hydrology. This study develops a novel approach to measuring rainfall intensity in real‐world conditions based on videos acquired by ordinary surveillance cameras. The proposed approach employs a convex optimization algorithm to effectively decompose a rainy image into two layers: a pure rain‐streak layer and a rain‐free background layer, where the rain streaks represent the motion blur of falling raindrops. Then, it estimates the instantaneous rainfall intensity via geometrical optics and photographic analyses. We investigated the effectiveness and robustness of our approach through synthetic numerical experiments and field tests. The major findings are as follows. First, the decomposition‐based identification algorithm can effectively recognize rain streaks from complex backgrounds with many disturbances. Compared to existing algorithms that consider only the temporal changes in grayscale between frames, the new algorithm successfully prevents false identifications by considering the intrinsic visual properties of rain streaks. Second, the proposed approach demonstrates satisfactory estimation accuracy and is robust across a wide range of rainfall intensities. The proposed approach has a mean absolute percentage error of 21.8%, which is significantly lower than those of existing approaches reported in the literature even though our approach was applied to a more complicated scene acquired using a lower‐quality device. Overall, the proposed low‐cost, high‐accuracy approach to vision‐based rain gauging significantly enhances the possibility of using existing surveillance camera networks to perform opportunistic hydrology sensing.

considering local government policy in water risk

This paper is about incorporating local government and utility policies/actions in measures of water risk, which in the past have tended to focus on physical measurements. This makes sense because there are some very water scarce places that have managed their limited resources well, and there are some moderately water scarce places where political and bureaucratic mismanagement of resources have led to crises. This probably makes some sense because when the lack of water is starkly obvious (if your country is a desert for example), it is impossible to ignore whereas when the problem is only going to crop up under extreme conditions, local politicians and less competent bureaucrats can ignore it the vast majority of time and nobody will raise the alarm. Better data might help make these crises more predictable and preventable, rather than seeming to sneak up out of nowhere.

Mapping Public Water Management by Harmonizing and Sharing Corporate Water Risk Information

by Colin Strong, Paul Reig, Julian Köbel and Cindy Noe – March 2018

In response to water crises across the globe, data on biophysical conditions associated with water risk have increasingly been collected and understood. However, a complete assessment of water risk also requires an understanding of public water management. Currently there is a lack of global comparable data on public water management, leading to incomplete assessments of risk and suboptimal risk mitigation activities. To fill in that gap in data, this Technical Note proposes the creation of a global comparable geodatabase of public water management indicators to spur tangible improvements in water management. The geodatabase will be populated by crowdsourcing data through the risk assessments of multinational companies that are incentivized to share anonymized public water management as an innovative risk reduction practice.

May 2018 in Review

Most frightening stories:

Most hopeful stories:

  • There are some new ideas for detecting the potential for rapid ecological change or collapse of ecosystems.
  • Psychedelics might produce similar benefits to meditation.
  • Microgrids, renewables combined with the latest generation of batteries, are being tested in Puerto Rico.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

April 2018 in Review

Most frightening stories:

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

gaming the system in Arizona

Arizona water managers are being accused of finding a way to gain the system as climate change takes hold and there may not be enough water to fill both Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

Under a formula set by the state and the U.S. Interior Department, Lake Powell will send 9 million acre-feet to Lake Mead this year to prevent shortage, rather than the 8.23 million acre-feet it would send under normal river conditions. Each acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons and is enough to serve about two households for a year.

Conserving enough to prevent a shortage but not so much as to slow the flow from Lake Powell represents a “sweet spot,” CAP argued, in language that has now alarmed upstream water officials…

CAP’s “manipulation of demands in order to take advantage of the supposed ‘sweet spot’ in Lake Powell water releases undermines (regional conservation), and is unacceptable,” Denver Water CEO James Lochhead wrote.

gamification and water planning

This article is about gamification and water planning.

A review of water-related serious games to specify use in environmental Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis

Serious games and gamification are nowadays pervasive. They are used to communicate about science and sometimes to involve citizens in science (e.g. citizen science). Concurrently, environmental decision analysis is challenged by the high cognitive load of the decision-making process and the possible biases threatening the rationality assumptions. Difficult decision-making processes can result in incomplete preference construction, and are generally limited to few participants. We reviewed 43 serious games and gamified applications related to water. We covered the broad diversity of serious games, which could be explained by the still unsettled terminology in the research area of gamification and serious gaming. We discuss how existing games could benefit early steps of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), including problem structuring, stakeholder analysis, defining objectives, and exploring alternatives. We argue that no existing game allows for preference elicitation; one of the most challenging steps of MCDA. We propose many research opportunities for behavioral operational research.

Phoenix’s water supply

Phoenix wasn’t on the recent list I posted about the cities most likely to experience a serious water crisis, but maybe it should have been. According to The Guardian:

Phoenix gets less than eight inches of rainfall each year; most of the water supply for central and southern Arizona is pumped from Lake Mead, fed by the Colorado river over 300 miles away…

That river is drying up. This winter, snow in the Rocky Mountains, which feeds the Colorado, was 70% lower than average. Last month, the US government calculated that two thirds of Arizona is currently facing severe to extreme drought…

The Phoenix area draws from groundwater, from small rivers to the east, and from the mighty Colorado. The Hoover Dam holds much of the Colorado’s flow in the vast Lake Mead reservoir, but the river itself is sorely depleted. That water has now dropped to within a few feet of levels that California, Nevada and Arizona, which all rely on it, count as official shortages. Lake Powell, the reservoir at the other end of the Grand Canyon, similarly averages half its historic levels.

Let’s review – snowmelt, rainfall, and groundwater all disappearing, and the city continues to grow.

February 2018 in Review

Most frightening stories:

  • A general rule across many types of wildlife is that their range after urbanization decreases to between one-half and one-third of what it was before urbanization.
  • The Cuban sonic attacks are real. At least, the people who experienced them have real brain damage, even if we still don’t know what technology did the damage.
  • Cape Town will probably not be the last major city to run out of water.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

11 cities most likely to run out of drinking water

BBC has a list of the 11 cities most likely to run out of drinking water. Cape Town, South Africa is not on the list, because it is out of drinking water. Here’s the list:

  1. Sao Paulo
  2. Bangalore
  3. Beijing
  4. Cairo
  5. Jakarta
  6. Moscow
  7. Istanbul
  8. Mexico City
  9. London
  10. Tokyo
  11. Miami

London and Tokyo surprised me, while some of the high-growth developing capitals didn’t surprise me but are nonetheless extremely concerning. There are plenty of cities that probably would be on the list but aren’t because they have invested massively in desalination. many of the coastal cities on this list may ultimately have to follow suit, or else convince their national governments to invest in major pipeline projects. And this is just drinking water, of course. Food has to be grown elsewhere and brought in to all the world’s cities, and industry also has water needs. Ecosystems also need water, but does anyone expect them to be anywhere other than last on this list?